"Microsoft is turning the source code for its embedded .Net Micro Framework over to the community and slowly withdrawing from that business, company officials are confirming. On the rumored list of teams most heavily impacted by second wave of Microsoft layoffs announced on May 5 was the .Net Micro Framework team - as well as the related MSN Direct unit. Indeed, both groups were affected, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed on May 6."

On a completely different note, how long do you reckon before someone ports it to the Nintendo DS or the venerable Gameboy advance?

Even if the MSIL is limited, it would still be kinda funny to see a .Net game running on the DS or GBA. Hardware calls and C/C++ inter-op are possible, so it would just be a matter of getting the HAL made and then creating an assembly to map all the hardware features.

could be could but .Net micro framework is still worse than JavaME in term of language crippleness.
they both are interpreted, tough I like the C# syntax better than Java, I think .Net micro framework simply can't compete with plain C in the embedded market, because of the memory constrain, Devs actually have more control over memory.

And in term of platform dev like psp or ds, I think that lua got more momentum in the homebrew scene.

Yeah the major problem of bytecode VMs is the upfront memory requirements to JiT all that bytecode into native machine code. I doubt this problem would go away in embedded devices for a long time to come.

Some embedded system can't even handle C, making assembly the only viable language.

Others are quite capable of handling managed language systems. On some scenarios the applications are JIT ahead of time, when the application gets deployed into the system.

C and assembly hold the biggest slice of the embedded development languages, but there are quite a few solutions out there making use of Java and .Net. Even obscure languages like Oberon get used in some scenarios.